


An Anchor

by AlphaLimaMike



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 09:26:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4823753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlphaLimaMike/pseuds/AlphaLimaMike
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>WARNING: TRESPASSER SPOILERS.  Cullen sees the Inquisitor return from the Darvaarad with her hand missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Anchor

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a fill for a prompt on r/Cullenmancers

Maegwin laughed as Bull tried to keep her from bleeding to death. It wasn't funny, not in the slightest, but the hysterical feeling building in her chest was going to have release one way or the other: it was either laugh or cry, and so she laughed, but the tears came anyway, and she wiped them away with a bloody hand, looking up into the endless twilight sky and screaming with helpless laughter.

"I can't heal this," Dorian told her, and his voice sounded very far away. "Maegwin, I'm not a healer, I can't possibly--"

"We need to return to Halamshiral," Cole said, entirely unperturbed. "She isn't able to heal this on her own. Small wounds, yes, but this is--"

"Not a small wound," Bull finished grimly. "Yeah, I can see that. I've tied it off, and it should be all right for now, but we have to hurry. A tourniquet isn't meant for long-term: we have to get her help _fast_."

He picked her up as easily as she might have done a child, and took off as fast as he could go without jouncing her around too much. The journey was grim, and Maegwin was not lucid for large parts of it. She remembered at one point coming back to herself from whatever fugue she had been lost in, and telling her companions, "Don't let Cullen see me like this, please."

"Why, does he faint at the sight of blood?" Dorian asked, fear putting a sharp edge in his voice. "Should we change our clothes before we let him know you have lost a limb?"

"Vanity," she replied faintly. "You understand."

"Of course I do. You have my word: Bull and I will guard your door for as long as necessary."

"Cole?"

"If that's what you want, but you know he won't care," he told her solemnly. "He loves you."

_He loves you, he loves you, he loves you..._ It seemed to echo endlessly in her head as she recalled with wrenching clarity the first time they had made love, how Cullen had reached for her hands as he followed her to completion. How she had held his hands through the worst of the withdrawals, stilling the tremors and trying to take the chill from his skin. _An anchor, **his** anchor,_ Cole had once said, and it seemed like a lifetime ago since she had kneeled with Cullen on the frozen flagstones of the garden, scared and uncertain, their whispered prayers hanging white in the still air.

_Hands warm, soft, soothing and safe..._ There were no _hands_ anymore, only _a_ hand, one single hand, and it wasn't the same, it could never be the same again.

Maegwin cried as Bull carried her back to Halamshiral.

 

 

Cullen let his arm hang off the bed, absently petting the mabari sprawled on the floor. He had not yet settled on a name for it, though Maegwin had taken to calling it - of all Maker-damned things - Cuppake: _short for Cupcake,_ she had explained with a maddeningly charming smile. And the dog, perverse creature that it was, had wagged its tail so hard its whole body had been wiggling. None of the names _he_ had suggested had garnered such a reaction, and so he had begun to resign himself to the fact that his new warhound was named Cuppake, short for some horrifyingly sweet Orlesian confection, but it didn't mean that he had to _like_ it.

But deep down, though he would never admit it, he thought it was rather funny: the juxtaposition of the cloyingly sweet name and the solid, deadly mabari that held it was almost inappropriately hilarious. _Just like the woman who came up with it in the first place_ , he thought with a smile.

A soft knock on his door dragged him from his reverie. "Who's there?" he asked sharply, pulling on yesterday's doublet and breeches and moving quickly to the door.

"It's me, Cole," came the subdued answer. "Will you open the door, please?"

He did, and was met the with the awful sight of the spirit lad standing there spattered with blood. "Maegwin has been hurt," he explained carefully. "She is not in danger any longer, though. I promised not to fetch you until she asked for you: she wanted to be clean and healed before you saw her."

A million thoughts ran through his head in that one moment, and he settled upon, "Is she? Clean and healed, I mean?"

"No, but she wants you, though she doesn't say so out loud. She keeps thinking about your hands, and it makes her very sad. Will you come?"

"Stay here," he directed the dog - _Cuppake_ , if he could bring himself to think it without scowling - and shut the door firmly behind him. He followed Cole through the labyrinth of corridors to what he vaguely remembered to be Dorian's room.

"Why is she here?" he asked with more indignation that he had intended.

"It was closer," Cole explained calmly. "It was an emergency."

An emergency that had at least one of her companions covered in gore. Cullen's stomach lurched at the thought, though he reminded himself that Cole had said she was out of danger. But what did that mean? What had happened?

As he reached up to knock, Bull opened the door and stepped out. Cullen caught a single glimpse of Maegwin inside, perched on the side of the bed, blood matting her hair and streaked upon her pale face, speaking to Dorian and what he could only assume was the healer. Something was wrong with the shape of her, something was horribly off, but his mind took several seconds to process what it was, and when he realized, his knees buckled. _Her arm, her arm was gone._

Bull reached out and snatched him up to standing by his hair. "None of that," he cautioned. "I've had enough dramatics for one day."

Dorian cracked the door. "Look, she says if you're going to stand out here looking like you've been struck by lightning, you might as well come in and help her get cleaned up. I'm surely not about to assist her in stripping off her clothes."

And so he found himself in a room that still held the sharp, metallic smell of spilled blood, looking in shock at his wife. His wife, who had from the very first reminded him of a bird; jumping from one thing to the next, here and then gone, brown hair like a wren, green eyes wide and inscrutable like an owl, and now she sat before him wounded and frightened, covered in drying bloodstains, a beautiful songbird lying broken in the dirt.

Maker, this had to be a mistake, this wasn't ever supposed to be the outcome. Even in his darkest imaginings, when - _if_ \- she came back to him, it was in one piece: scarred, wounded, but otherwise whole. He'd never imagined this, never thought to fear such an impossibility.

All the times he had reached out for her and she had been there, her presence the only steadying thing in his life, and now she stretched her hand out to him, and he found himself momentarily frozen, too afraid and unsure to move a muscle. Had she felt like this? Had it been this hard for her?

"Oh, my little bird," he sighed, and took her hand. "This wasn't supposed to happen, was it?  But I'm here with you and everything will be all right."


End file.
